Not anything new, but I did really like this:
"We wanted to capture that feeling from the first game and I think as the series progressed, it actually got better and better in a lot of ways and tighter and tighter - but I think some of the flexibility that you had to explore was sometimes overwhelmed by the way the encounters played out. Don't get me wrong - in Halo 4, many is the time you're going to look at the horizon and think, 'I wanna explore that', and you've got other problems to deal with before you can do that.

"But that was the feeling we wanted to recapture of [a] very high level, was the feeling of freshness and wonder that you had the first time you played Halo. That's a fairly hard challenge and you know people are quite cynical and quite used to Halo at this point, but I think we did a pretty good job of rewarding people for exploring and occasionally giving them moments where they can sort of step back and smell the roses.

I've been replaying the games and I really loved the pacing and exploration of Halo 1. There were spots in the other games where I got that same feeling, but not as much. I felt with Halo 3 and especially Reach that exploration outside of the main path was discouraged and hindered too much. I'm trying to stay dark on campaign, but the shots I have seen are beautiful. I really do hope that they allow us more freedom to easily explore the world they've created.